The Difference Between Fun, Difficult, and Obnoxious

Nintendo hard is not Diablo fun.

I'm turning 30 this year. I've been gaming since before I can remember. I mean that literally: I have pictures of me playing games on old macintosh machines, atari, these images of memories from my life that I can't even remember. I very much grew up with gaming.

For me, it's kind of becoming a backdrop for what I do as an adult, which would be writing and editing. I don't play games like I used to. I now analyze them, an unthinking compulsion to dissect and categorize, shuffle around concepts and logic in my head to come to some kind of conclusion. Of which I've had many. My chosen profession, my passion, bleeds into everything else I do.

I have concluded that while some aspects of gameplay make a game more difficult, they also make it stupid and not fun. As a writer, as an editor, I think about these things while playing. All of the complex systems of a modern game working in tandem. What's the goal of a game? What's the goal of the narrative in a game? How does gameplay and narrative work together, what could be improved in this relationship?

So here's what I'm going to ask you as a game designer:

Is it better for a game to be difficult but obnoxious, or is it better for a game to be fun?
You're catering to not two crowds but to every crowd, and this kind of peppershot approach doesn't work.
The days of "nintendo hard", the days of artificial difficulty, need to go.

So why bring up all this crap about how long I've been gaming? Because I've also been collecting. I've been collecting rage and hatred over stupid, creatively-voided gameplay ideas such as fearing and fleeing. You may not appreciate this but you are about to benefit from my thirty years of gaming, if you even care what I have to say.

Diablo III is a collection of AI behavior that I absolutely hate. With a great passion.

So let's get down to business.

What is artificial difficulty?

Artificial difficulty is a set of gameplay mechanics that make the game harder than it should be in a shitty way. Like fearing. It's not actually difficult because difficulty means that you are presented with a challenge that you can feasibly do something about in some kind of strategic manner. Artificial difficulty is monster behavior or abilities that just suck to the point where you cannot game it at all, you can't take advantage of it, and often, there's not a goddamn thing you can do about it.

It's being jailed on a spot of desecration. It's shielding. It's being feared. It's playing Diablo III.
The difficulty modes themselves are artificial difficulty. You tack on some more cheesy modifiers and inflate health and damage numbers. This doesn't make the game more difficult. This makes you buy gear from the auction house to tear shit apart in-between being CC'd and chasing down countless monsters for hours on end.

This is not difficult. But it is obnoxious.

What it is and why it sucks:


In Germany, at GamesCom 2010, Jay Wilson presented the artisans for the first time. He said "everything levels up in diablo 3, even the vendors."
Eh. I don't think that's true. A more accurate statement would have been "Everything flees in Diablo 3, even the vendors if you're rubberbanding."

This is, for me, a completely game-breaking, and rather expansive issue. I played a lot of the beta, a LOT, and I just kept on thinking whenever I logged out "no, no they won't have more mobs like the skeleton summoners, because that's just lame as hell." I was wrong.

There's hit and run fleeing, where you're just being kited (hellflyers), there's "i'm going to run in a circle around you so you can't hit me for no apparent reason" fleeing, and then there's just plain "i'm going to run off screen and return with a giant pack of monsters" fleeing.

They are all just awful. Particularly the mobs who run in a circle around you. Ever bust a full orb of fury and not be able to hit a single goddamn monster? Launch six arcane orbs at a single ghoul and not hit it once? Drop a meteor at any point in time and it hits nothing, even if you adjust and give it lead time? Leave a trail of poison darts that hit nothing but air? I sure have.

Do you think this actually makes gameplay more challenging? No, it makes it obnoxious, and you just have to wait until the little idiot is done circling you before you flatten him with a single hit. There's nothing difficult or challenging about this unless you count the meta-game of testing a player's patience.

Rock worms. Ah, ah mah gahd rock worms. What the ever-living hell was being smoked during their design process? I can't even get into it. I would like to see the stats for how many people actually grit there teeth and sit there to kill rock worms instead of just completely ignoring them. One of the most infuriatingly annoying monsters I have ever seen in a video game.

Chase stop swing miss. Run burrow stop swing miss burrow. Chase stop swing miss. Run burrow stop swing miss burrow. Chase stop swing miss. This is Diablo III.